Orlandohttp://www.newgeography.com/category/story-topics/urban-issues/orlando
The taxonomy view with a depth of 0.enCentral Florida: Stepping Into Deep Densityhttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004804-central-florida-stepping-into-deep-density
<p>Florida is on track to break the 20 million population mark by 2016, or possibly even this year. The Sunshine State will displace New York as the third most populous state in the country, just behind California and Texas. Nationally, rural counties absorb a lot of newcomers of modest income or fixed income seeking affordable places to live. Here in Orlando, however, banks and developers are betting big on a newfound taste for the urban lifestyle, beckoning new arrivals with hip-looking apartments and parking garages, often coupled with shopping plazas full of pricey, name-brand retailers. This is a gamble of huge proportions. Regrettably, it's just another bubble waiting to burst.</p>
<p>North of downtown Orlando, two commercial corridors wind through various towns. Orange Avenue is Orlando’s version of Main Street (below: high density housing with a view of Interstate 4, Orange Avenue, and Highway 50 in Orlando, the three busiest roads in town).</p>
<p><img src="http://www.newgeography.com/files/reepdensity1_595x351.jpg"></p>
<p>Six new multifamily projects here are open or nearly completed. These are mid-rise buildings, four stories or greater, taking advantage of downtown’s proximity. Of course, each of these structures sports a new parking garage, acknowledging that our love affair with the car is still going strong.</p>
<p>US 17-92 is an even larger, 4-lane commercial strip running from downtown all the way up through Winter Park, Eatonville, Maitland, Altamonte Springs, Longwood, and beyond. It’s an Orlando version of Broadway, linking multiple neighborhoods and districts. It's also a traffic-choked crawl, best to be avoided at certain times of the day. Nevertheless, three mid-rise apartment blocks loom over the cars, a high-rise senior living building is open for retirees, and several more are in the works (see below, at a rare, quiet moment. Still, this mock-historical apartment complex holds the street line).</p>
<p><img src="http://www.newgeography.com/files/reepdensity2.jpg"></p>
<p>Each one of these developments ventures deeper and deeper into urban renewal territory, looking for the market’s edge. A recent proposal will displace warehouses along Orange Avenue, but is still firmly entrenched on the more profitable side of the railroad tracks. All of these developments take old or underperforming suburban sites and convert them into new, higher density blocks. The city, it seems, has finally triumphed in the battle for the hip and the cool.</p>
<p>And it is a victory of sorts, at least for the short term. Each lender who funds a suburban infill project saves, for the time being, a greenfield exurban parcel that might otherwise have been chosen for the project. Florida is a state with a remarkably stressed natural environment, and these projects keep people close to the action, reducing the need for future corridors in the wilderness.</p>
<p>Before the closing credits roll, however, the long-term impacts of these developments bear a closer look. While cities clap their hands for urbanism and the tax dollars it brings in, local citizens quite sensibly ask certain pointed questions… like, 'what about traffic'? None of these new residents will do without a car, and at least <a href="http://www.wpmobserver.com/news/2014/aug/13/ongoing-traffic-woes-winter-park-trader-joes"/>one local development</a>, approved blithely by municipal officials, now frustrates drivers for blocks around. More of the same is coming.</p>
<p>Symptomatic, perhaps, of the current economy’s consumer weakness, most of these projects displace local producer activities. Instead of protecting home-grown businesses, municipal power has hastened their demise, driven by a real estate market which judged that they were not contributing to the economy at a high enough level. Gone are local commercial artists, two local sawmills and lumberyards, and a local hotel, all of which were net producers in the local economy. </p>
<p><img src="http://www.newgeography.com/files/reepdensity3.jpg"></p>
<p>What has come in their place are yet more grocery stores — the adjacent grocery store is always a part of the formula — more hair salons, and name-brand apparel shops. Minimum-wage workers, many working for tips, now stand at cash registers where once business owners and entrepreneurs stood. These local independent businesses close down, or scatter to the more affordable periphery, which is becoming home to a new sprawl of producers. Shipping giant Amazon, for example, just completed a large facility in Florida. Near its customers in a metropolitan area? </p>
<p>Nope: in rural Ruskin, locally famous for its beefsteak tomatoes. Elsewhere, local entrepreneur <a href="http://www.floridatrend.com/article/16957/carola-seminario">Carola Seminario</a>, manufactures cosmetics in suburban Plantation, Florida, inland from Ft. Lauderdale. These businesses are far away from the dense urban core that traditionally hosted new business ventures. Like England, lampooned for becoming a “nation of shopkeepers” in the expansionist Victorian era, Florida’s urban population is becoming a reef of retail clerks and restaurant servers laboring for franchise bosses.</p>
<p>In the meantime, Office occupancy rates are at a ghastly low in Central Florida, so urban development of office space is anemic. Instead, our oversupply of retail outlets just seems to keep rising. The multistory apartment stack, perched over a retail/restaurant base, has become a copy and paste routine. None of the tenants are local, independent retailers, either; the triple-net lease is only affordable to big national brands. Density is a game only the big boys can play, it seems.</p>
<p>With Central Florida’s new commuter train rolling through town, the density might make some sense. But land value around rail stops has spiked in anticipation. Instead, development is occurring in the soft pockets of town, places where older, overlooked properties can be assembled with a minimum of fuss and cost. The result is that none of the new multifamily locations are really walkable to a train station. Hence, huge parking garages.</p>
<p>After the applause has died down, a flush of new apartment dwellers may soon find out that a mortgage payment outside of the central city wouldn't have been much higher than the monthly rent in town. Most people with kids, or planning for them, believe that raising them in apartments isn’t much fun. Grass, literally, is always greener. Meanwhile, Orlando cannibalized its local economy in a rush to approve these places, and became just another bland, warm commercial amalgam not much different than anywhere else in the southeast.</p>
<p>By the time the city's changes are fully visible, the transformation will be complete. Central Florida will have lost independent businesses to a miasma of ubiquitous name-brand franchises. A few service jobs will have been created, but the real careers are in corner offices of the chains’ corporate headquarters, way beyond the reach of Orlando's residents. Rental rates will decline as growth stretches the market for a limited number of connoisseurs of the high-density lifestyle, and a gradual, insidious wealth disparity creates a new urban poor. </p>
<p>The only vision, however, may be hindsight. After the bubble has burst, high density housing will remain. City planners have already begun rearranging infrastructure around this supposed densification: school boards, for example, are consolidating K-8 schools in anticipation of this new population. Urban planning, however, has to be measured in decades. School district planning, a long, slow, consensus-driven political process, takes years to implement. By the time a new school might open for the children in these places, the demographics might have shifted once again.</p>
<p>Density is good in principle. It can breed efficiency, intensify business, and make a town throb with life. But in practice today, it seems to hollow out parts of the city. Dad doesn’t work on the ground floor of the apartment block; he drives to work, just like in the suburbs. Mom doesn’t hang around all day watching the kids and baking cookies; she drives to work also. The sidewalks aren’t filled with pedestrians on their way somewhere, cars slip in and out of garages, silently activating gate arms, and the kids are safely ensconced in front of electronics, not playing outside down below.</p>
<p>The pricey tenant space on the ground floor doesn’t house local bakers, tailors, or professionals that live up above. Instead it houses a few minimum-wage store clerks scanning merchandise. The building form resembles this turn-of-the-century dream state — often stylistically, as well as functionally — but it’s a monstrous hybrid of the old and the new. Localism is traded away, and in its place a new feudalism, where remote landlords control vast segments of the urban realm, takes its place. With Florida’s population growth, there will still be places to prosper, but they seem less and less likely to be in the metropolis.</p>
<p><em>Richard Reep is an architect with <a href="http://www.voa.com/">VOA Associates, Inc.</a> who has designed award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects. His work has been featured domestically and internationally for the last thirty years. An Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, he teaches urban design and sustainable development; he is also president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. Reep resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.</p>
<p>photos by the author </em></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004804-central-florida-stepping-into-deep-density#commentsHousingOrlandoPlanningFloridaThu, 08 Jan 2015 11:42:12 -0500Richard Reep4804 at http://www.newgeography.comOrlando Arts Scene: It's an Urban Bus Triphttp://www.newgeography.com/http%3A/%252Fwww.newgeography.com/content/004544-orlando-arts-scene-an-urban-bus-trip
<p>Artists are bus riders. With day jobs to keep food on the table, they often forego luxuries, using feet and bicycles, as well as buses, instead of cars. They travel alongside many people for whom the bus is an absolute necessity. Too often, the bus is a class marker in America, and a racial marker in the South. Many do not want to cross the threshold of the bus. With artists increasingly passing through this doorway, the <a href="http://transitinterpretationproject.com/">Transit Interpretation Project</a> began, first in Orlando, Florida and now in Roanoke, Virginia. It is painting a new picture of the bus, revealing the reality behind the myths, and the humanity behind the faceless term &ldquo;mass transit&rdquo; that is so often used as a shorthand for problems and class divisions in our country.</p>
<p>Taking the bus in the South still has a stigma. Since Rosa Parks&rsquo; era, the bus has remained an unfortunate symbol, reinforced by the waves of immigrants that have swelled the region's population in recent decades. Many who move to the South seek the prosperous life of the American Dream, and the bus is not part of that pursuit.</p>
<p>For many here in Orlando, Florida, the bus doesn't register any significance in their lives. Its association with poverty and the working-class South remains visible, if a bit faded.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve ridden buses in Orlando and cities all over the country, and in a few other countries, too. Here in the South, the stigma still exists. I decided to ride a bus in Orlando during the summer, and learn firsthand what is happening on these lumbering behemoths of metal that steams along our crowded streets.</p>
<p>My participation began on the #50, a bus route from downtown Orlando to Disney World. I sat alongside Judy, a night worker who left her house at 6:30PM to get to her night shift job starting at 10PM. Petite but hard-edged, Judy and her fellow night workers&rsquo; three-and-a-half hour commute each way is not for the leisure class. Coming back late at night, I joined a bus full of uniformed employees, droopy and exhausted from their service to the world travelers who come to play in Orlando.</p>
<p><a href="http://transitinterpretationproject.com/2014/08/08/searching-for-the-soul-of-the-tropical-city/">My own little blog</a> to report my experiences became part of this project, along with art by photographers, writers, painters and sculptors. For example, <a href="http://nathanselikoff.com/">Nathan Selikoff</a>, a digital artist, made several animated computer graphics out of his bus ride experiences, including one based on my blog.</p>
<p>The Transit Interpretation Project, TrIP for short, is an ongoing effort. The project&rsquo;s work was <a href="http://orlandoweekly.com/arts/visual/trip-shows-humans-of-orlando-at-gallery-at-avalon-island-1.1738455">exhibited at the Gallery at Avalon Island</a> in downtown Orlando in August 2014. The result is an artist&rsquo;s eye on the shared social space of the city.</p>
<p>TrIP was the brainchild of Pat Greene, the current Director of the Gallery at Avalon Island. He recently spoke to me about the project. &ldquo;Initially, when commuter rail was being proposed in Orlando, people parroted a lot of misinformation,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;both for and against it. Train planners were using very analytical arguments, and contrarians were mostly being emotional about their protest. Both sides were very confident, but in many cases, both sides were also very wrong&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Orlando&rsquo;s commuter rail opened this summer to the public with much fanfare, and has generated controversy. Greene, like many others, listened with skepticism to advocates&rsquo; claims that it will reduce traffic, because it rides on a nineteenth-century spine through a multipolar, twenty-first century, dispersed urban area. He also listened to opponents who decried it as costly and useless. He decided neither side had all the facts, and wanted to see for himself what buses and trains were really like in Orlando.</p>
<p>Greene received two bus passes from friend. He invited artists to use them, and then write, paint, photograph, or make anything inspired by the experience, and post it to his website. The site remains open; anyone can participate by emailing their entry to Pat Greene at<a href="mailto:hearsay@gmail.com">hearsay@gmail.com</a>. Contributors need not have any credentials, they need only to ride the bus and react.</p>
<p>Greene carried his experiment to a colleague in Roanoke, Virginia. There, Jeremy Holmes, the director of a Ride Solutions Program that helps commuters find bus and carpool routes through the city, began a similar project. The results were displayed at Roanoke&rsquo;s Marginal Arts Festival this year, illuminating another Southern town&rsquo;s bus rider population.</p>
<p>Analysts and talking heads don&rsquo;t much ride the bus and therefore have little firsthand knowledge of the experience. On one bus ride in Orlando, an African-American man asked artist Jessica Earley to teach him how to pray; you can see her blogpost, labeled <a href="http://transitinterpretationproject.com/2013/12/07/trip-blog-day-6-unaffiliated-grace-by-jessica-earley-trip_orlando-publictransportation-publicart/">Unaffiliated Grace</a>. On another, artist Greg Leibowitz had to convince security guards that <a href="http://transitinterpretationproject.com/2014/08/09/trip-taking-photos-in-a-public-place-is-not-a-crime-by-greg-leibowitz/">taking photographs was not a crime</a>; in spite of this, he captured marvelous portraits of riders. Artist <a href="http://transitinterpretationproject.com/2013/12/10/trip-blog-day-9-wearing-the-8-by-bethany-mikell-megan-steward-and-kelly-berry-trip_orlando-publictransportation-publicart/">Bethany Mikell</a> sewed a dress from the images she gathered on the #8. Colombian <a href="http://transitinterpretationproject.com/2013/12/29/trip-blog-27-ill-be-home-soon-by-ivan-riascos/">Ivan Riascos</a> mused, &ldquo;What does this city have to offer me?&rdquo; as he looked out the window of the #41. Each post, whether in writing or in images, adds a dimension to the individuals of the city.</p>
<p>While the quality of the Orlando contributions is uneven, the point is not to critique the exhibition as art. It is, rather, to provide an opportunity to join a large-scale investigation into the meaning of twenty-first century public space in an American city of medium size. The space isn&rsquo;t consistently crowded and hectic, nor is it consistently vacant. TrIP doesn't consistently represent artists or riders who are black, white, brown, or any specific race or class. Instead, the blog posts build up a narrative of a rainbow rhythm marked by a gentle diversity, much common agreement about the miserable time-cost of the working person&rsquo;s commute, and a view of a unique collection of humans that make up Central Florida&rsquo;s specific and localized condition.</p>
<p>This narrative gains its power from mining an overlooked, shared public space of the city: the inside of buses and trains. Greene eschewed officialdom in activating this project. &ldquo;If I had approached Lynx [Orlando&rsquo;s bus system] about doing it, I would have been in endless meetings with lawyers,&rdquo; he commented. Instead, he just got on the bus and started chronicling what he saw, and encouraged other artists to do so as well.</p>
<p>In a world where class privilege increasingly isolates people, transit is about the only vestige of the old urban experience where a broad cross-section of society can mix. It is a space that is owned by all of us, just a little bit. Sidewalks, if anyone has noticed, are usually empty in most cities today, making one less place where we can spontaneously encounter strangers. We&rsquo;ve moved our social time online, building safer and safer little cocoons to prevent rubbing elbows with other classes. Artists seeking human portraits would have wasted their time on street corners in Orlando.</p>
<p>On the bus, time with strangers revealed a great deal of warmth and emotion. The resulting portraits reveal the dignity of those who ride the bus. It makes me, as a resident of this town, feel a little closer to its soul.</p>
<p><em>Richard Reep is an architect with <a href="http://www.voa.com/">VOA Associates, Inc.</a> who has designed award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects. His work has been featured domestically and internationally for the last thirty years. An Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, he teaches urban design and sustainable development; he is also president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. Reep resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.</em></p>
<p><em></p>
<p><em>Photo by the author: "Judy".</em></p>
<p></em></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/http%3A/%252Fwww.newgeography.com/content/004544-orlando-arts-scene-an-urban-bus-trip#commentsUrban IssuesOrlandoSat, 04 Oct 2014 00:04:36 -0400Richard Reep4553 at http://www.newgeography.comWhat College Gowns Bring to Townshttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004432-what-college-gowns-bring-towns
<p>The college town, one of America’s most appealing and unique features, grew out of the Age of Reason, and the concept of a regional, liberal-arts college nurtured by a small town has been intertwined with American history. Today, with enrollment dropping, the small, private college seems to be going the same way as the typewriter, the newspaper and the independent bookstore. While some colleges struggle to survive, the institution of the college town lives in suspended animation, ready to support whatever form its major employer may take. One thing’s for sure: the reinvention of the post-college town is coming.</p>
<p>Here in Central Florida, the tradition of a liberal-arts college entwined with a small or medium-sized municipality is alive and well, for the moment. But trouble is brewing. While private institutions in Central Florida may not advertise their funding problems, the truth is plain to see. Rapid expansion of athletic programs, sure-fire profit centers for most schools, is underway at <a href="http://www.winterparkvoice.com/">Rollins College, Stetson, and University of Tampa</a>, and all are exploring other ways to reach more students, as well.</p>
<p>Florida’s public universities are not immune to budget problems, either. And their response to the financial crisis says much about the future of college towns everywhere. </p>
<p>Reinvention of the liberal arts college itself has been a cottage industry for the last several years. Student body diversification into “lifelong learning” (read: the lucrative retiree demographic), extensions, outreach campuses, and summer programs for primary and secondary schools has surged, as colleges try to open new markets. Bloated administrative costs have given rise to urgent fundraising and athletic programs, while an army of poorly paid adjunct professors shoulder an increasing burden of responsibility for the actual work of teaching. But, as Moody’s <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/small-u-s-colleges-battle-death-spiral-as-enrollment-drops.html">analyst Susan Fitzgerald has said</a> about small, tuition-dependent colleges, they are in “a death spiral – this continuing downward momentum for some institutions [means] we’ll see more closures than in the past.” </p>
<p><i><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21605906-cost-crisis-changing-labour-markets-and-new-technology-will-turn-old-institution-its">The Economist</a></i> magazine has compared colleges to newspapers. If their analogy were to hold true, of the 4,700 colleges and universities in the world, “more than 700 institutions would shut their doors.” Citing the rise of massive, open, online courses or MOOCS, the magazine suggested that the idea of a professor interacting face-to-face with students will become a luxury. Colleges seem destined to end up in the same tiresome boat as the rest of the digital world, where everything, ultimately, becomes a product on Amazon.</p>
<p>Uncertainty about the future has hastened the liberal arts school’s demise. In the darkest days of the recession we were told there was a STEM crisis: science, technology, engineering and mathematics were the fields that would get you a job. People ditched their liberal arts pursuits for more practical, employable ones, swearing off the indulgent frivolity of a philosophy course for a computer programming class. Panicking parents and students stampeded out of the gothic halls of the English department as fast as they could.</p>
<p>Here in Florida, to pay for a new state campus in Lakeland, the Governor gutted the operational budget of Florida’s 11 other institutions of higher education. The new campus, located on rural land adjacent to Interstate 4, is far from any sort of population center. It's a soulless commuter school; any form of a college town to accompany it lies far, far in the future. </p>
<p>USF Polytechnic is being billed as a “destination campus”. Its showy new structure nearly complete, it lies naked to the Florida scrub and Interstate 4, with a few lonely stucco buildings and portable classrooms marking a kind of desperate, treeless sense of place in the hot Florida sun. No flip-flop-shod students strumming guitars, debating the meaning of Proust or the relevance of Marx will ever be found under its oak trees or in front of its bohemian coffee shops, because there aren’t any. Instead, there’s a harsh, asphalt parking lot and a long, hot trudge to the endpoint, another signal that one’s college years are just like a shopping trip to Wal-mart.</p>
<p>If the one-in-seven death rate holds true, then one of the seven college towns in Central Florida will not have a future either. Gainesville, DeLand, Winter Park, St. Augustine, Tampa, Lakeland, and St. Petersburg are seven places with streets, residences, and businesses that each have grown up around colleges, public and private, and that enjoy a thriving sidewalk life. </p>
<p>Ironically, at least two of these colleges were born in another desperate time, the Great Depression. The University of Tampa, across the Hillsborough River from downtown Tampa, started in a failed hotel when the city took it over from owner Henry Plant’s railroad empire. Likewise, Flagler College in St. Augustine began in a resort hotel built by New York railroad magnate Henry Flagler. The small, private, liberal-arts college was a perfect solution. A grand old structure was re-inhabited, and a struggling city was bolstered. </p>
<p>Towns that grew up around these places have different, more informal qualities than other towns. In Gainesville, for example, churches, temples, student centers, and other non-profit institutions occupy prominent positions within the urban core. There's a diversity of old houses with garage apartments, lean-tos, and enclosed porches. Wood apartment buildings have side stairs, outdoor beer kegs, and bicycle racks. They sit under huge, mature trees, clad in subtropical philodendron vines, and are connected by narrow dirt pathways carved independent of sidewalks. A sense of grown-over-time pervades within and around campus, its boundaries softened by sneaker and bicycle traffic, concert posters and poetry reading notices.</p>
<p>Gainesville, with nearly fifty thousand students, will probably survive, but other, smaller towns may struggle. As conversion to digital learning reduces costs, the college town may disappear. Anonymous reviews, posted online, replace conversations in bookstores. University Avenue may be deleted, just like yesterday’s term paper. </p>
<p>Our bookshelves are crowded with titles about the urban future, but in all of this furious scribbling it seems no one has noticed that sidewalks have all but emptied out in many of our cities. Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and a few more still march to the pedestrian beat. But a fairly thorough survey of peninsular Florida yields few sidewalks with any kind of street life — and the few that still operate as shared, social space all belong to our college towns. </p>
<p>Students, with one foot in childhood and one in adulthood, still walk on sidewalks. They shop online, too, but they still patronize businesses for the sake of the social interaction, and still have use for the physicality of the street… for a street life that seems to be endangered. </p>
<p>College towns, living on today in a shadow of their former bohemian selves, will be reinvented, just as education systems will. But for now, deprived of street life, we breed a different sort of citizen and thinker than an old college town once did. This new digital citizen will construct social space in ways yet to be foreseen.</p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect with <a href="http://www.VOA.com">VOA Associates, Inc.</a> who has designed award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects. His work has been featured domestically and internationally for the last thirty years. An Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, he teaches urban design and sustainable development; he is also president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. Reep resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family. </p>
<p>Photo of downtown Gainesville by the author. This scene is typical of the streets surrounding the campus of the University of Florida.</i></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004432-what-college-gowns-bring-towns#commentsOrlandoPlanningSmall CitiesSuburbsFloridaWed, 06 Aug 2014 01:38:38 -0400Richard Reep4432 at http://www.newgeography.comFlorida: When Density is Destructivehttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004356-florida-when-density-destructive
<p>Brick streets, mature old oaks, and a sense of history imbue Winter Park, Florida with a sense of place that is the envy of many small cities and towns. The tony Park Avenue brings shoppers and visitors, who soak up its ambience and enjoy the street life of this quaint southern town. On the east side, bounded by blue lakes, lie gentrified historical mansions, while the west side is a neighborhood of smaller, affordable homes with multigenerational Winter Parkers. This community of little single-family homes is now endangered by developers that are gobbling up parcels two and three at a time, increasing the density threefold, and squeezing out residents in a new, “zoning for dollars” economic climate. </p>
<p>Affluence and affordability have always maintained an uneasy truce, and the balance between them has historically been protected by cities through planning policies and an understanding that the mission of a city is to be workable for all of its residents, not just the wealthiest. Unfortunately, this balance tilts when the density imperative drives land values up, and tips the scales in favor of half-million dollar townhomes. High density has become fashionable in Winter Park these days, as it has in many cities, and there are some benefits to this new style. The costs? Well, those will be counted later.</p>
<p>Density’s benefits look great on paper: a higher tax base, expensive new housing, walkable urbanity. When implemented well, these can make for positive changes. Advocates preach careful, sensitive ways to develop: don’t smash large and small buildings together; don’t mix uses on a street, and ramp up from low to high density across a gradient of a block or two. Advocates also preach a consensus-building process to avoid neighborhood clashes over growth issues. In places where this has happened, like Coral Gables in Miami, the story has mostly been a good one.</p>
<p>The west side of Winter Park, with its cottages and modest residences for families, dates back to the 1920s. Within the neighborhood are many small churches to which residents walk on Sundays. Playgrounds, parks, and a community center characterize the West Side’s tree-shaded streets, and its proximity to the downtown area means jobs for many of its residents. For the last ninety years, the city has evolved around this neighborhood, and many families go back several generations. Its diversity includes many African American families, mixing with whites. It carved out a niche in the city.</p>
<p>Today, the West Side is an older and less affluent neighborhood that happens to be close to a desirable address. The West Siders have already chosen their preferred building pattern and rhythm, infilling their blocks with new homes of similar size and scale, enlarging the tax base. They already live a walkable urban lifestyle, use mass transit, and evolve with slow and organic growth. In short, every urbanist’s dream.</p>
<p>Like many cities that have a working class enclave that butts up against a newly trendy one, Winter Park has encouraged dense, mixed-use development, while nominally protecting its existing neighborhoods. And this is where the density equation seems to fall apart. The residents who leave the area will no longer participate in the economy of Winter Park. The new residents of half-million-dollar townhomes probably won’t ride the bus, walk to the churches, or otherwise activate the local streets. So a natural piece of the city is lost forever. Urbanism, for all that has been written in favor of this ideology, is diminished for the sake of density.</p>
<p>West Siders <a href="http://www.winterparkvoice.com">protested in City Hall</a>, asking the city not to upzone their neighborhood. While City Hall nodded to its citizens, it had already quietly allowed upzoning to take place, taking advantage of tired homeowners who decided to cash in. Half-million-dollar townhomes, which could be built in other areas, are instead being built here, to take advantage of low land values. Parking garages and midrise apartments now cast shadows on the adjacent small houses. Land values may rise on those parcels with new townhomes and midrise apartments, but immediately next door, the remaining adjacent little one-story cottages become particularly undesirable; the value of those homes becomes depressed. The owners' only hope is to sell off to a high-density developer. Step by step, high density becomes more and more inevitable as the only solution left.</p>
<p>The market forces at work in Winter Park have played out elsewhere across the country, with old neighborhoods eroding. This time around, with density all but institutionalized as the only acceptable way to grow, the deck seems to be stacked against entrenched locals. Cities are re-writing their development codes in favor of shiny new mid-rises and high-rises, ignoring existing residents who won’t be missed till they are gone.</p>
<p>When the market, an amoral institution without sentiment, threatens neighborhoods, it is the job of City Hall to provide a hedge that ensures balance and fair play. But citizens have to shout over the money in order to be heard, so local groups like the <a href="http://friendsofcasafeliz.wordpress.com/">Friends of Casa Feliz </a>have stepped in on their side. If “zoning for dollars” can work against this section of the city, groups fear, then no one is safe, and people are reminding City Hall of its duty as a guardian of its residents.</p>
<p>Density, on its own, is neither a good nor a bad thing. It can make a city more efficient and connected, and proponents tout its <a href="http://designinghealthycommunities.org/">reputed health benefits</a> and contribution to a thriving social life. When, in the process of allowing density, a city destroys the very values that it is supposed to promote, then the city ends up cannibalizing its neighborhoods for little benefit other than the one-time gain that the developers will realize from the sale of these newly built products. Income streams are put into mortgage-holders’ pockets, and, bit by bit, one more highly localized economy disintegrates.</p>
<p>City halls, so obsessed with petty regulations, would do well to recall their basic functions as protectors of their residents. If there were a “back to basics” movement for government, many ordinances written to benefit the few would be shed, and there would be a refocus of attention back to the public good. The current infatuation with density, like many fashionable ideas, may come and go, but if a multigenerational neighborhood goes, it won’t be replaced in our lifetime. </p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect with <a href="http://www.VOA.com">VOA Associates, Inc.</a> who has designed award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects. His work has been featured domestically and internationally for the last thirty years. An Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, he teaches urban design and sustainable development; he is also president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. Reep resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family. </p>
<p>Photo by Betsy Owens of the Friends of Casa Feliz: "Preserved 1920s Cottage on Lyman Street", Winter Park, Florida. </i> </p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004356-florida-when-density-destructive#commentsOrlandoPlanningFloridaFri, 13 Jun 2014 01:38:54 -0400Richard Reep4356 at http://www.newgeography.comFlorida: How Fine Art Became Localhttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004277-florida-how-fine-art-became-local
<p>Fine art resides not only in the cosmopolitan cities. It lived, as we saw in the recent movie “The Monument Men”, in the many villages of Europe. Right now, we are seeing it living on the periphery of Orlando, Florida.</p>
<p>Home to Stetson University, DeLand is forty minutes north of the regional core of downtown Orlando. It is one of those delightful, off-the-beaten-path towns that tourists love to stumble upon and explore; the largely intact, century-old strip along Woodland Boulevard is vibrant, bohemian, and alive. Florida’s archipelago of cities compete for the hip and the cool, and it is easy to dismiss places like DeLand. Cities and towns in this state have, for the most part, yet to grow the kind of institutions that speak of maturity, sophistication, and worldliness. The draw of DeLand is not sidewalk urban hipsters sipping lattes; instead, it speaks of a new age of curiosity, individuality, and appreciation for experience outside of the roaring din of the city. The newly re-named <a href="http://www.moartdeland.org">Museum of Art – DeLand</a> signifies a powerful future for this part of Central Florida.</p>
<p>Formerly called the Museum of Florida Art, the museum’s new name – no qualifiers, no excuses – befits a mission that brings world-class art to its patrons. “First and foremost, we serve our community,” said George Bolge, the Museum of Art - DeLand’s Chief Executive Officer. Bolge, retired from the Boca Raton Museum of Art, was asked to head up this museum and expand its scope and its reach. “At the same time, we are participating in the broader conversation about what art is, and where it is going. Our voice is being heard loud enough that people in New York are talking about what we are doing.” </p>
<p>In the first half of 2014, Bolge’s exhibition run includes veteran Florida artist Jill Cannady, whose evolving career has stayed one step ahead of her critics. “This is important for people to see, and she is right here under our noses in DeLand, Florida,” said Bolge. Recent exhibitions like “Forging an Identity: Contemporary Latin American Art” drew patrons to exciting international artists who have helped shape Florida’s cultural and social ideas.</p>
<p>In the official story of urban triumphalism, a museum executive should take his victory lap in Manhattan or Paris. Bolge, however, chose not to follow the herd. He was beckoned to DeLand by the opportunity to take an arts institution from good to great. The museum has its own building, a tan, prismatic form just north of downtown. Its exterior is a windowless enigma which belies a wonderful, light-filled volume within, one suited for showing world-class art. Its multifunction lower level has an atrium space and gallery, and an upper level gallery and classrooms. It's a flexible facility that does its job by putting the art first, staying in the background, and being accessible to all. </p>
<p>Even more interesting is the Museum of Art – DeLand’s downtown satellite, at the corner of Woodland and New York, six blocks south of the main gallery. This space, with a wood-floor and the rough-brick feel of a Chelsea loft gallery, recently exhibited “Small Masterworks” borrowed from the <a href="http://www.butlerart.com/collection.htm">Butler Institute of American Art</a>. Ascending the stairs, one is greeted by a free-flowing series of galleries which take you from a sunlit-filled reception area to a deep, introspective space that cleverly maximizes the art viewing experience. From Benjamin West, an American-born colonial artist, to Warhol, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, and others in the late 20th century, “Small Masterworks” provides sensitive and moving documentation of the evolving American art scene. DeLand, the quintessential American town, seems to be a perfect setting for it. </p>
<p>This is the new story of Florida which is just now being written. While local art lovers are enriched by such an institution, it is drawing more and more attention from the surrounding metropolitan areas. With this museum, DeLand is now exporting culture to the city, in a reversal of the trend, signifying a maturation of the Florida arts scene. </p>
<p>The Butler, in Ohio, is another example of this reversal. Nearly a century old with multiple locations today, The Butler is a solid institution with an international reputation. Something interesting is happening. As we have become used to mobility and flexibility, our world is no longer limited to where we live and work. With the internet, we are becoming increasingly connected. This favors DeLand, and places like it, with a new equity of distance – cutting-edge ideas are now a few clicks away. People in far-flung areas are less isolated. </p>
<p>DeLand has a college vibe — a built-in art appreciation population — and with the rise of retiree enrollment, expect this population to go up. It’s affordable, walkable, and fun, with few of the big-city evils like crime and congestion that can scare away newcomers. No longer a tropical wilderness out of which man once carved a crude existence, Florida may now be settling down and becoming a more civil and aesthetic experience for its citizens. Towns like DeLand offer something that big cities like Orlando and Miami cannot: a high quality, human-scale lifestyle.</p>
<p>“In DeLand,” Bolge stated, ”I’ve noticed that people have a pretty high opinion of their town… there is a spirited investment into making its art museum into a great institution.” Bolge sees this museum is a conduit to channel the story of Florida art into the broader flow national artistic energy. “We’re going to be showing what the Florida art patron likes, too,” he said, “so later this year, you will have a chance to see what a Floridian does with a world-class collection of artists." “We are here for the local community,” says Bolge, “but it doesn’t hurt that we have a profile outside the community as well.” </p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect with <a href="http://www.VOA.com">VOA Associates, Inc.</a>, and an artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years. He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development, and is president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.</p>
<p>Photo by Lisa Habermehl: Downtown satellite location of The Museum of Art - DeLand</i></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004277-florida-how-fine-art-became-local#commentsOrlandoFloridaSat, 03 May 2014 08:04:44 -0400Richard Reep4277 at http://www.newgeography.comThe Reinvention of Sanford, Floridahttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004212-the-reinvention-sanford-florida
<p>Sanford, Florida was in the midst of reinventing itself. Then the calamity of Trayvon Martin’s violent death turned this sleepy Florida town into a poster child for everything that's wrong with the state. Now that the media frenzy has moved on to other troughs, the residents must sweep up the mess. As is often the case, compassion and healing have been operating quietly in the background. Two years after the tragedy, this healing process is being highlighted through a grant by <a href="http://ashokau.org/">Ashoka University</a> to document the lives and faces of the people of this small, historical town. <a href="http://thesanfordproject.com/">The Sanford Project</a> was begun by a group of students and artists to capture the unique culture and character of the city, and to turn around perceptions of Sanford.</p>
<p>Led by Olivia Zuk, a recent graduate of nearby Rollins College, The Sanford Project recently exhibited its results at 'Say It Loud', a pop-up gallery space in nearby Orlando. “The media willfully misinterpreted Sanford,” she said, “and we decided that it was critical to overcome the passing controversy and focus on the true nature of this Central Florida town”. During an internship last summer in New York City, total strangers, Europeans as well as Americans, approached her about its lurid reputation. Ms. Zuk’s eyes flashed as she added, “I had had enough. This is my backyard and it needs to be properly defined, and this ugliness put behind us.” When she returned from New York, she received a grant to create a media circus, this time of her own design.</p>
<p>The Sanford Project quickly attracted eight other students. A startling photographic odyssey captured humanistic portraits of the town’s residents, overcoming its caricature status and reminding viewers of Sanford's real people. Seeking to go out of their comfort zone, the collaborators accepted invitations into churches homes, businesses and communities, gathering intimate stories and the personal reflections of Sanford’s residents, including memories of the celery-farming days of the 1940s and before.</p>
<p>While the individual stories and images are remarkable, what is more remarkable is that these students, on their own, chose to reach out to collaborate with Sanford’s residents. And even more remarkable than this gesture is the fact that they were most often greeted with pride and acceptance. “We did not force it,” explained participant Destiny Deming, “but as the project progressed we all felt more at home in a city that several of us aren't even natives of.”</p>
<p>Lauren Cooper, another participant, said, “I didn't get turned down to speak with a single person, or hear any outcry to critique our cause. That silence, ironically, speaks.” The quality of this small town is probably not unique, and belies the illusion that our big cities are our greatest triumph. Olivia Zuk and her students found, instead, a triumph in the humanity that came out of this effort to re-connect with the small town.</p>
<p>The project's images, video, and documentary will be coming home to Sanford later this spring. Building solidarity built between the city and the small, peripheral town must be done to rebuild a state of compassion and shared ownership out of the ashes of our greed-driven, cynical culture. The Sanford Project takes the necessary first step, and although the pathway is long, the first step is the hardest. </p>
<p>Participant Aaron Harriss described The Sanford Project as “suburban white kids from Orlando interested in historic African American communities”. The sardonic, self-deprecating comment belies his generation’s interest in localized connectivity over and above the “official” storyline of a community. Rocked by charges of racism, and guilty by association, Central Floridians were stung by the Trayvon Martin publicity. Few rose to speak, or set the story straight, however, until Olivia Zuk and her Sanford Project team stepped in.</p>
<p>“Being from the millennial generation, most of us working on the project learned about the segregation of white people and black people pretty early on,” reflected Ms. Zuk after interviewing a Sanford resident. Segregation was a story told like a history lesson, at arm’s length, and for many suburban white kids this might be close enough. But Zuk took with her a multiracial team of Lauren Cooper, Destiny Deming, Christopher Garcia, Leila Gray, Aaron Harriss, Angelica Milan, Victor Rollins and Lauren Silvestri. </p>
<p>They sat with African-Americans, heard stories of racism, participated in the African-American culture of Sanford, and supported the local Martin Luther King Day parade. They learned more about the city than many of the region's occupants knew: Sanford’s history, like that of many small towns, conceals some darker episodes, such as the story of <a href=" http://www.goldsboromuseum.com/The-History-of-Goldsboro.html">Goldsboro</a>, an African-American town that was forcibly incorporated into the larger town of Sanford in 1911. But it has many joyful tales, also, stories of beating the odds. The surrounding celery and orange fields have been eclipsed by the theme parks, but Sanford sustains itself as a town with a desirable quality of life. </p>
<p>Lingering in the twilight of its agricultural boom, Sanford today is off Central Florida's beaten path; it's about a 40 minute ride from downtown Orlando. Its historic downtown and surrounding residential community is beautiful, but its population has struggled to grow. </p>
<p>A reinvention was long overdue. Then, in stepped the media, reinventing Sanford in the wake of young Martin’s tragic death: small southern town, fill in the rest of the blank. This condemnation, inevitable in today’s city-worshipping culture, seems all too pat. Caught off guard, perhaps, Sanford was unable to push back at a media framework in which you are either a darling or a pariah, but never anything in between.</p>
<p>The millennial generation’s nonhierarchical view of society, symbolized by The Sanford Project, is a pathway out of the good-or-evil, red-and-blue polarization that we continually encounter. Increasingly, however, these black-and-white cartoons ring hollow and empty, unable to withstand scrutiny. </p>
<p>Is this cycle unbreakable? The students and artists who have captured Sanford’s character through images and stories have started the hard work to do just that. Millennials, like the generations that preceded them, may someday come to accept this either/or view of the world. For now, however, efforts like the Sanford Project — efforts that are not profit-driven, but rather socially driven — are rebuilding our squandered moral capital. </p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect with <a href="http://www.VOA.com">VOA Associates, Inc.</a>, and an artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years. He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development, and is president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.</p>
<p>Photo by Destiny Deming of children outside of their Sanford home. </i></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004212-the-reinvention-sanford-florida#commentsOrlandoFloridaTue, 18 Mar 2014 01:38:53 -0400Richard Reep4212 at http://www.newgeography.comForget What the Pundits Tell You, Coastal Cities are Old News - it’s the Sunbelt that’s Boominghttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004197-forget-what-pundits-tell-you-coastal-cities-are-old-news-it-s-sunbelt-s-booming
<p>Ever since the Great Recession ripped through the economies of the Sunbelt, America’s coastal pundit class has been giddily <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/foreclosures-still-concentrated-in-Sunbelt-cities/70395" target="_blank">predicting its demise</a>. Strangled by high-energy prices, cooked by global warming, rejected by a new generation of urban-centric millennials, this vast southern region was doomed to become, in the <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-is-the-american-dream-dead-in-the-south/283313" target="_blank">words of the <em>Atlantic</em></a><em>,</em> where the “American dream” has gone to die. If the doomsayers are right, Americans must be the ultimate masochists. After a brief hiatus, people seem to, once again, be <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/americans-migration-patterns-shifting.html?_r=0" target="_blank">streaming towards the expanse of warm-weather states</a> extending from the southeastern seaboard to Phoenix.</p>
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<p>Since 2010, according to an American Community Survey by <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.demographia.com" target="_blank">demographer Wendell Cox</a>, over one million people have moved to the Sunbelt, mostly from the Northeast and Midwest.</p>
<p>Any guesses for the states that have gained the most domestic migrants since 2010? The Sunbelt dominates the top three: Texas, Florida and Arizona. And who’s losing the most people? Generally the states dearest to the current ruling class: New York, Illinois, California and New Jersey. Some assert this reflects the loss of poorer, working class folks to these areas while the “smart” types continue to move to the big cities of Northeast and California. Yet, according to American Community Survey Data for 2007 to 2011, the biggest gainers of college graduates, according to Cox, have been Texas, Arizona and Floria; the biggest losers are in the Northeast (New York), the Midwest (Illinois and Michigan).</p>
<p>For the most part, notes demographer Cox, this is not a movement to Tombstone or Mayberry, although many small towns in the south are doing well, this is a movement to Sunbelt cities. Indeed, of the ten fastest growing big metros areas in America in 2012, <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/03/metros-clobbered-housing-crisis-are-growing-again/4991" target="_blank">nine</a> were in the Sunbelt. These included not only the big four Texas cities—Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio—but also Orlando, Raleigh, Phoenix, and Charlotte.</p>
<p>Perhaps the biggest sign of a Sunbelt turnaround is the resurgence of Phoenix, a region devastated by the housing bust and widely regarded by contemporary urbanists as the “<a sl-processed="1" href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-least-sustainable-city-phoenix-as-a-harbinger-for-our-hot-future" target="_blank">least sustainable</a>” of American cities. The recovery of Phoenix, appropriately named the Valley of the Sun, is strong evidence that even the most impacted Sunbelt regions are on the way back. </p>
<p>A look at the numbers on domestic migration undermines the claim that most Americans prefer, like the pundit class, to live in and near the dense Northeastern urban cores. People simply continue to vote with their feet. Since 2000, more than 300,000 people have moved to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte; in contrast a net over two million left New York and 1.4 million have deserted the LA area while over 600,000 net departed Chicago and almost as many left the San Francisco Bay region. These trends were slowed, but not reversed, by the Great Recession.</p>
<p>The Sunbelt’s recovery seems likely to continue in the future. Immigrants, who account for a rising proportion of our population growth, are increasingly heading there. New York remains the immigrant leader, with the foreign-born population increasing by 600,000 since 2000 but second place Houston, a relative newcomer for immigrants, gained 400,000, more than Chicago and the Bay Area combined. The regions experiencing the highest rate of newcomers were largely in the south; Charlotte and Nashville saw their foreign-born populations double as immigrants increasingly beat a path to the Sunbelt cities.</p>
<p>The final demographic coup for the Sunbelt lies in its attraction for families. Eight of the eleven top fastest growing populations under 14, notes Cox, are found in the Sunbelt with New Orleans leading the pack. Generally speaking, roughly twenty percent or more of the population of Sunbelt metros are under 14, far above the levels seen in the rustbelt, the Left Coast, or in the Northeast.</p>
<p>This all suggests that the Sunbelt is cementing, not losing, its grip on America’s demographic future. By 2012 and 2017, according to a <a sl-processed="1" href="http://news.pb.com/press-releases/pitney-bowes-software-data-analytics-says-houston-atlanta-washington-will-add-new-households-five-yr.htm" target="_blank">survey by the manufacturing company Pitney Bowes</a> nine of the ten leading regions in terms of household growth will be in the Sunbelt.</p>
<p>If the population growth rates <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/004153-moving-south-and-west-metropolitan-america-2042" target="_blank">predicted</a> by the US Conference of Mayors continue, Dallas-Ft. Worth will push Chicago out of third place among American metropolitan areas in 2043, with Houston passing the Windy City eight years later. Now seventh place Atlanta would move up to sixth place and Phoenix to 8th. Of America’s largest cities then, five would be located in the Sunbelt, and all are expected to grow much faster than New York, Los Angeles or the San Francisco area. Overall, the South would account for over half the growth in our major metropolitan areas in 2042, compared to barely 3.6 percent for the Northeast and 8.7 percent in the Midwest.</p>
<p><strong><em>What drives the change? Not just the sun, but the economy, stupidos!</em></strong></p>
<p>From the beginning of the Sunbelt ascendency, sunshine and warm weather have been important lures and this may even be more true in the near future. But the key forces driving people to the Sunbelt are largely economic—notably job creation, lower housing prices and lower costs relative to incomes.</p>
<p>Until the housing bust, states like Arizona, Nevada and Florida were typically among the leaders in creating new jobs but their performance fell off with the decline of construction. But other Sunbelt locales, notably Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma have picked up much of the slack. This resurgence has been centered in Texas, which created nearly a million new jobs between 2007 and 2013. In contrast, arch-rival California has lost a half a million.</p>
<p>Many other Sunbelt states have yet to recover jobs lost from the recession, but most of their big metros have shown strong signs of recovery. Since 2007 <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.houston.org/economy/blog/index.html#february182014" target="_blank">five of the seven fastest growing jobs markets</a> among the twenty largest cities were in Sunbelt states. Looking forward, recent estimates of job growth between 2013 and 2017, according to <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2013/09/25/arizona-texas-head-list-of-best-states-for-expected-job-growth" target="_blank"><em>Forbes </em>and Moody’s</a> project employment to grow fastest in Arizona, followed by Texas. Also among the top ten are several states hit hard by the Recession, notably Florida, Georgia and Nevada. No Northeastern state appeared anywhere on the list; nor did California.</p>
<p>For all its shortcomings, including what some may consider the overuse of tax breaks and incentives, the much-dissed Sunbelt development model continues to reap some significant gains. The area’s history of lagging economically has long spurred Sunbelt economic developers to utilize a policy of light regulation, low taxes and lack of unions to lure businesses to their area. Sunbelt states—Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arizona—dominate the ranks of the most business friendly states in the union, <a sl-processed="1" href="http://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-for-business-2012" target="_blank">notes Chief Executive <em>magazine</em></a>, findings they often cite when courting footloose businesses.</p>
<p>The clear economic capital of the Sunbelt is now Houston, with some stiff competition from Dallas-Ft. Worth. Houston, <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.ibtimes.com/us-energy-boom-puts-houston-top-corporate-expansion-projects-area-housing-inventory-13-year-low" target="_blank">the energy capital</a>, now ranks second only to New York in new office construction and is the overall number one for corporate expansions. There are fifty new office buildings going up in the city, including Exxon Mobil’s campus, the country’s second largest office complex under construction (after New York’s Freedom Tower). Chevron, once Standard Oil of California, has announced <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/18/us-occidental-headquarters-idUSBRE98H0EU20130918" target="_blank">plans</a> to construct a second tower for its downtown Houston campus while Occidental Petroleum, founded more than fifty years ago in Los Angeles, is <a sl-processed="1" href="http://m.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2014/02/14/occidental-petroleum-splintering-and-moving-its.html?r=full" target="_blank">moving</a> its headquarters to Houston.</p>
<p>Houston’s ascendance epitomizes the shift in the geographic and economic center of the Sunbelt. The “original in the Xerox machine” for Sunbelt style growth, Los Angeles’ rise was powered by new industries like entertainment and aerospace and oil, ever expanding sprawl and a strong, tightly knit business elite. Pleasant weather and Hollywood glitz still inform the image of Los Angeles, but under a regime dominated by government employee unions, greens and developers of dense housing, it suffers unemployment almost four points higher than Houston . Nine million square feet of space is currently being built in Houston, compared to just over one million in Los Angeles-Orange which has more than twice the population. It is not in the rising Sunbelt but in places like Southern California, where <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.thejournal.ie/financial-pressures-and-lack-of-affordable-housing-linked-to-low-fertility-rates-1226760-Dec2013" target="_blank">jobs lag amidst high costs</a>, that the American dream now seems most likely to die.</p>
<p><strong><em>Movin’ on Up</em></strong></p>
<p>In Houston particularly but throughout the Sunbelt, job growth critically is not tied to cheap labor, but to industries like energy which pay roughly $20,000 more than those in the information sector. According to <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.economicmodeling.com" target="_blank">EMSI,</a> a company that models labor market data, energy has generated some 200,000 new jobs in Texas alone over the past decade. Although Houston is the primary beneficiary, the American energy boom is also sparking strong growth in other cities, notably Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, and Oklahoma City.</p>
<p>Once dependent on low-wage industries such as textiles and furniture, the energy boom is pacing a Sunbelt move towards generally better paying heavy manufacturing. Texas and Louisiana already lead the nation in large new projects, many of them in petrochemicals and other oil-related production. Of the biggest non-energy investments, three of the top four, according to the Ernst and Young Investment Monitor, are in Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina, which are becoming the new heartland of American heavy manufacturing, notably in automobiles and steel. Since 2010, Birmingham, Houston, Nashville and Oklahoma city all have enjoyed double digit growth in high paying industrial jobs that used to be the near exclusive province of the Great Lakes, California and the Northeast.</p>
<p>The Sunbelt resurgence is important in part because it offers some hope to millions of Americans who may not have gone to Harvard or Stanford, but have work skills and ambition. The region’s growth in what might be called “middle skilled jobs” that pay $60,000 or above has been impressive.</p>
<p>It may come as a surprise to some, but the Sunbelt is also pulling ahead in high tech jobs. In a recent <a sl-processed="1" href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/004062-the-surprising-cities-creating-the-most-tech-jobs" target="_blank">analysis of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) job growth for Forbes</a> we found that out of out of the 52 largest regions, the four most rapid growers over the past decade were Austin, Raleigh, Houston and Nashville, with Jacksonville, Phoenix and Dallas also in the top fifteen. In contrast New York ranked #36th out of 52 and Los Angeles, a long-time tech superpower, now a mediocre #38.</p>
<p>In another example of how much things are changing, when college students in the South now graduate, noted a recent University of <a sl-processed="1" href="http://cw.ua.edu/2014/01/28/graduates-increasingly-seeking-big-city-life/" target="_blank">Alabama study</a>, they do go to the “big city” but their top four choices outside the state are in the Sunbelt—Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, Tenn., and Dallas—and followed then by New York. The biggest net gains in people with BAs and higher are primarily in the sunbelt, led by Phoenix, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Austin, Houston and San Antonio; the biggest losers, according to Cox’s calculations, have been New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and, surprisingly given its reputation, Boston.</p>
<p>These trends may become more pronounced as the current millennial generation starts settling down into family life. Housing costs could prove a decisive factor. In terms of the median multiple, median housing cost as share of median household income, Sunbelt cities tend to be about half as expensive as New York, Boston or Los Angeles, and one third of the Bay Area. </p>
<p>To be sure, many of the “best and brightest” will continue to flock to New York, the Bay Area or Los Angeles, but many more—particularly those without Ivy degrees or wealthy parents—may migrate to those places where their paycheck stretches the furthest. The Sunbelt, with its job growth, strong middle class wages and lows housing costs, is a good bet for the future. </p>
<p><strong><em>What will the future bring?</em></strong></p>
<p>Prosperity, Herodotus reminded us, “never abides long in one place.” Certainly the Sunbelt economy could lose its current momentum but fortunately, having been schooled by the housing bust, many Sunbelt communities are increasingly focused on improving their basic economy—jobs, income growth, and skills-based education. Tennessee and Louisiana, for example, have led the way on expanding working training, and some of most ambitious education reform is taking place in New Orleans and Houston.</p>
<p>Yet, there are many threats to continued growth, both internal and external. Given his penchant for executive orders and his close ties to wealthy green donors, President Obama could take steps—for example clamping down on fossil fuel development—that could reverse the steady growth along the Gulf Coast. Any draconian shift on climate change policies would be most detrimental to the energy sector Sunbelt states.</p>
<p>But President Obama will not be in office forever<em>.</em> In the long run, the biggest threat to the Sunbelt ascendency is internal. Some fear that as more easterners and Californians flock to the area, they will bring with them a taste for the very regulatory and tax policies that have stifled growth in the states they left behind . Most worryingly, so called “smart growth” regulations could drive housing costs up, as occurred in Florida and several other states in the last decade, and erode some of the Sunbelt’s competitive advantage.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most immediate threat comes from the angry, reactionary elements on the right, who tend to be more powerful in the sunbelt than elsewhere. These groups, sometimes including the Tea Party, have taken positions on issues like immigration and gay rights that local business leaders fear could deprive their regions of energetic and often entrepreneurial newcomers. Equally important, the right’s anti-tax orthodoxy, although perhaps not as devastating as the huge burdens placed on middle class individuals in the North and California, could delay critical outlays in transportation, parks and other essential infrastructure in regions that are growing rapidly. This is particularly true of education, a field in which most Sunbelt cities, while gaining ground, remain below the national average.</p>
<p>Whatever one thinks of the motivations of the green clerisy, there are clearly environmental measures, particularly in the Sunbelt’s western regions, that these cities need to enact to protect future growth. This includes reducing the amount of concrete that creates “<a sl-processed="1" href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/phoenix-is-doomed-to-be-a-target-for-doomsayers/" target="_blank">heat islands</a>,” expanding parks, and shifting to more drought resistant plants.</p>
<p>Fortunately, many leaders throughout the Sunbelt, particularly in its cities, are aware of these challenges, and are looking for ways to tackle them. This is driven not by the doomsday environmentalism common in California and Northeast, but grows instead out of a practical concern with stewarding critical resources and creating the right amenities to foster continued growth.</p>
<p>Combined with basics like lower housing costs and taxes, it’s a common optimism about the future that really underlies the resurgence now occurring from Phoenix to Tampa. The long-term shifts in American power and influence that have been underway since the 1950s have not been halted by the housing bust. Disdained by urban aesthetes, hated by much of the punditry, and largely ignored except for their failings in the media, the Sunbelt seems likely to enjoy the last laugh when it comes to shaping the American future.</p>
<p><em>This story originally appeared at The Daily Beast.</em></p>
<p><em>Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375756515/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=newgeogrcom-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0375756515" rel="nofollow">The City: A Global History</a> and </em><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005B1BN90/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=newgeogrcom-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B005B1BN90" rel="nofollow">The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050</a></em><em>. His most recent study, <a href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/003133-the-rise-post-familialism-humanitys-future" rel="nofollow">The Rise of Postfamilialism</a>, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.bigstockphoto.com/image-6923427/stock-photo-houston-night-skyline">Houston skyline photo</a> by Bigstock.</em></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004197-forget-what-pundits-tell-you-coastal-cities-are-old-news-it-s-sunbelt-s-booming#commentsUrban IssuesDallasDemographicsEconomicsHoustonNew OrleansOrlandoPhoenixSat, 01 Mar 2014 11:39:28 -0500Joel Kotkin4197 at http://www.newgeography.comSearching Out The Half-Full Glass http://www.newgeography.com/content/004166-searching-out-the-half-full-glass
<p>There is a shiny, brittle skin to the economic recovery that conceals an unhealthy flesh underneath. It is tempting to call this condition a glass half empty. But seeking the healthy and the fit in nontraditional places has become a quest for more and more Americans who are leading us down a pathway that diverges, from the mainstream towards a new future. Out of earshot of the mainstream media and off of Main Street, there is a glass <a href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/004160-americas-glass-half-empty-or-half-full">half full</a>.</p>
<p>The official storyline of the economic recovery began in 2009 almost as soon as the stock market lost half its value, and masses of unemployed people listened to cheery reports that the recession was over, even as unemployment surged to 10%. With waning confidence in our institutions and leaders to guide us, people seemed genuinely at a loss to define a shared future of abundance and beauty. Since then, insidious corrosion has eaten away our traditional sources of optimism. In a sea change, the focus of many people is slowly shifting away from that glossy promotional veneer back towards person-to-person relationships and rebuilding moral capital one transaction at a time.</p>
<p>For many employees, a fulfilling career is a lost dream, traded instead for salary and benefits. In this phase of the curve it is still an employer’s market, and most employers manipulate the terror over loss of job to their advantage. Working hours are now pretty much 24/7 for many people, taking work home on weekends; answering business emails and phone calls at all hours of the day and night. </p>
<p>Today’s workers are jumpy and work far harder, for less than they had made in the before-times.<br />
Many employers, starved for profit in recent years, finally took what little profit they had in 2013, sharing little or none with the hardworking employees who had helped them to regain their economic footing. Those workers at the top who sweated the worst of it divided meager earnings among themselves, leaving little for the rest of the workforce. </p>
<p>Mainstream America bravely soldiers on, making 2004 wages, but with 2014 expenses. We are presented with more stuff to buy, more media to consume, and more gadgets to worship. Experiences that were once fundamentally outside of the mainstream economy – one’s college years, for example – are now a big business. There seems to be no refuge from the insistent, shrill attempts to monetize everything. It is easy to feel pessimistic and just a little debased, and to begin feeling dissident urges. Under our noses, however, another America lurks. </p>
<p>This is an America which hasn’t bought into the “too big to fail” system, and it has at least two demographic bases. The first is the portion of the millennial generation that has seen the damage done to their elders, and is now waiting it out, sneering at “suits” and instead creating its own economy out of localized, small moves. It operates with a healthy disregard for the establishment system. This group is in its first historical phase of creating its own food and shelter, carefully selecting strains of sustenance from local sources and operating a kind of “starting over” effort at the basic need level of the Maslow hierarchy. Food and shelter first, they reason; rebuilding a new system will come later.</p>
<p>It's a generation that has suffered from what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called the <a href=" http://www.amazon.com/The-Production-Space-Henri-Lefebvre/dp/0631181776">reproduction of the space of production</a> in their youth. This somewhat laborious phrase cites the space of production – the factory floor – as the model upon which all the rest of our space has been molded. School, said Lefebvre, is molded upon the factory floor, where students are taught to memorize and obediently regurgitate facts to their teacher/boss. Business leaders, anxious to produce workers, insist upon teaching to standardized tests, to reproduce the results they expect upon graduation. Education is replaced with being taught the business culture.</p>
<p>What Millennials reject is not so much the establishment itself, but rather the manager-worker relationship that has seeped into every corner of daily life, driven by the pressure for higher profits and faster throughput. What looks to boomers as sloth (because we are conditioned to respect this pace of production) is to them a form of dissent.</p>
<p>It's too soon to tell whether the millennial generation, like the boomers before it, will eventually succumb to the corporate world. Allied with them, however, are the new, immigrant Americans; people who have come to our shores to seek a new place to live and work. To the rest of the world, America is still the land of the free. People are escaping terrible conditions in cities like Cairo, Rio and Istanbul, and even more frustrating powerlessness in cities all around the world. To these new arrivals, many from non-OECD countries, America still represents opportunity. </p>
<p>New arrivals are treated with suspicion by a xenophobic, fear mongering media precisely because they are correctly viewed as not-yet properly conditioned. Those immigrants who buy into the promise of wealth may perpetuate a realm that is corporate-dominated, but many others may not. Our genius is our open borders, and as a nation of immigrants America has always renewed itself with their diversity.</p>
<p>A future of abundance and beauty must begin with small moves: a foundation upon which moral capital can be rebuilt. If integrity and trust can be found in simple transactions between individuals, then progress can indeed be made. It is here that a glass half full can be found, and it is here that the social space of America is being re-made. Dying strip malls are being replaced by farmer’s markets; vacant glass towers are being replaced by warehouse-based laboratory startups and home offices, just to name a few examples. This new generation, and these new immigrants, are proving that America is all right after all, and can rebuild itself without the worst trappings of the 20th century corporate world.</p>
<p>These are small, unglamorous trends. If they occur without “help” from Wall Street or without government regulation, are they dissent? Then so be it. Good people can bring to society a sense of uncorrupted – dare one say humanistic? – values. Our half-full glass should include a re-creation of space on a new model: space modeled not on production, but rather upon a shared and positive vision of the future.</p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect and artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years . He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development, and is president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family. </p>
<p>Flickr photo by khersee: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/arphot/6221294945/sizes/z/">Warehouse</a> — waiting to be repurposed? </p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004166-searching-out-the-half-full-glass#commentsFinancial CrisisMiddle ClassOrlandoFri, 14 Feb 2014 00:38:42 -0500Richard Reep4166 at http://www.newgeography.comHighway Eye-4, Revisitedhttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004125-highway-eye-4-revisited
<p>Interstate 4. It is a unique highway which is cursed by many drivers in Central Florida, and many more who come here in search of rest and relaxation. While Californians raise all highways to royal status — Interstate 5, for one, is referred to as "the five", as if it were some kind of important personage — Floridians just call their central artery I-four. My decision to chronicle I-4 was sparked by a recent experience. Along with my family, I was caught in a traffic jam as we headed east on I-4 outside of Disney World. I have been stuck on this very spot many times. But on this trip, as we sat listening to Janis Joplin, something new happened. </p>
<p>Along this stretch, one can take an off-ramp that runs parallel to the interstate, linking it to one of Central Florida’s toll roads. It travels for a couple miles in close proximity, and is elevated along a ridge of grass about 10 feet above the surface of I-4.</p>
<p>A ditch and a grassy embankment separate the off ramp and the interstate. As we watched, a driver in the right lane of I-4 turned off of the interstate, crossed the shoulder, went down into the ditch, and climbed up onto the parallel road, speeding away and out of the traffic jam. At first, one person did it, and then others followed. And then, about 500 feet ahead, we saw another stream of cars doing the exact same thing. And then, ahead of that stream, yet another stream of drivers drove over the embankment. It wasn't one or two cars, it was dozens and dozens; an en masse sheet flow ripping up the grass. People, fed up with the traffic mess, had taken matters into their own hands. And they were speeding away.</p>
<p>That is a phenomenon I haven’t seen before: collective abandonment of a pathway, even one that is highly discouraging. But then, maybe it's nothing new. I-4 has inspired bizarre and unusual behavior for years.</p>
<p>Back in 2012, I shared some highlights of <a href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/003003-swing-state-geography-the-i-4-corridor">this unique roadbed</a>. For example, a haunted part lies, perhaps not coincidentally, close to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. Just a couple of weeks ago, a section of the underbrush along the highway's edge was cleared, revealing a hillside cemetery. At the fence line there was newly painted stucco. In this area, I-4 is rumored to have a ghost or two from an early pioneer family that walks along the side of the road. Whether the highway was paved over part of the cemetery or the high-speed rumblings awakened the dead remains to be investigated.</p>
<p>In the 1980s and 1990s, living in Tampa, I actually kept an I-4 log book in the car. Occasionally an incident was worth writing down, but it ended up mostly as an inventory of objects encountered along the interstate:</p>
<p>• About 300 feet ahead of me a cardboard box tumbled off the rear bed of a pickup truck. The rolling, disintegrating contents included a boat chair on a 2 foot tall post and a light with wires flying off of it. I drove right over them. The chair made a very loud clunk. </p>
<p>• In Lakeland, a road crosses over I-4, with a ramp that goes down the embankment and turns abruptly onto I-4, sort of like a driveway. There is no acceleration lane because a railroad bridge abutment is immediately ahead. At this entrance ramp, one late afternoon I was behind a pickup truck without a gate that rolled down the ramp and accelerated quickly to merge into traffic. As it did, a huge, greasy black transmission fell off of the back. The ground shook when it hit, and I heard the thud. </p>
<p>• Malfunction Junction is the intersection of I-4 and I-275 in Tampa. I was travelling south on I-275 heading underneath I-4, driving my parents' 1972 Ford Torino station wagon. This is a tank of a car, all steel with a 302 V-8 engine. I still have dreams about it. I was going perhaps 50 early on a Sunday morning into downtown. Ahead of me by about 6 car lengths was a rusty pickup truck stacked with bales of hay. As the highway ducks under the I-4 bridge, it curves right and it slopes. The pickup was just under the bridge when a bale of hay fell off of it. With no possible reaction time, I plowed right into the hay. The nose of a Torino actually comes to a point, which sliced into the bale of hay, and blew it apart as I drove through, leaving behind a huge, golden-tan cloud. It didn't leave a scratch on the car — only a single hay straw was stuck in the windshield wiper. What stands out about this incident, even today, was that the hay gave no resistance whatsoever: when the car hit it did not shudder or make any noise at all. It was like driving through smoke. Such was the power of the Torino.</p>
<p>These incidents now seem almost archaic; circus sideshows from a bygone era. They are great Florida folk tales, stories of bubbas for after dinner entertainment. The events are faraway both in time and in spirit from the darker forces that haunt our population on the road today.</p>
<p>Those who are here on vacation, trying to relax and enjoy some family time, are tormented by a solid, stopped-up traffic-choked road full of millions of others who have come here to do the exact same thing. People reached a threshold of pain and crossed it, taking matters into their own hands and seeking stress relief during a vacation that was planned as stress relief in the first place. I-4 has become a metaphor for our times.</p>
<p>2009 and 2010 were years that really beat people up. By 2011 and 2012, many had adjusted their expectations and gotten really cynical about the future. Last year, things changed again. For some, the world has gotten worse. For those who were so swiftly unemployed and have become re-employed, the new working conditions are different. They work much harder, for less than before. They face uncertainty every single day, a holdover from the white-knuckled years. The stress wears on the inner compass, and the temptation to cut corners gets greater and greater.</p>
<p>When brazen self-interest spreads like wildfire, a sort of highway mob rule, if you will, I think that we as a society may be on the edge of something new and wild, as if the guardrails of rationality have weakened. </p>
<p>This little incident on Interstate 4 may be isolated, or it might be a symptom of a sea change. People who have been patient and docile have taken a beating over the last several years. We have put up with mental and emotional abuse as we've tried to make the world better for our children. In doing so, we've — mostly — stayed grimly entrenched in the collective good; the shared social values and the rule of law over men. </p>
<p>But when one or two people break off and steer their own course, how quickly many others follow. These are dangerous times, and our inner moral compasses are more important than ever before. We didn't preserve our collective sanity through all of the wicked and sorrowful events of the recent past, only to lose it all now. In the coming year, we must hold on for a little longer, and rebuild moral capital for future generations.</p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect and artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years . He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development. His writing has focused on art and architectural criticism, and on localism and its importance in establishing sense of place. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.</p>
<p>Flickr photo by Dean Shareski: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91312924@N00/2221340413/in/photolist-4ohX7D-4NMuET-4Utynz-5352h8-555LNU-5jYhX2-5kxGjg-5qp5sX-5yuZK6-5yv13B-5AERRa-5H5W7D-5L6VxW-5MwLzg-5Xyxki-5XCLeh-61ARgK-61F3Su-61MXLD-64mKym-66QU27-6o83w8-6pDCqJ-6tnE7c-6trPKU-6tu5Ek-6xNVYG-6zKf8x-6FvbU9-6MKCjp-6MKCTi-6MKDcP-6MKDw8-6MPPWL-6UMaPn-75pH97-7f449u-7xhpEE-7E3PJj-8yQwFq-aRyCMx-8xRTrT-7z1Ve2-7HBB6e-7E3Q3d-dRx4V3-dUerk8-cthwR5-8jCcCs-bkegXq-8g3Z25#">Traffic on I-4</a>, Orlando. </i></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004125-highway-eye-4-revisited#commentsOrlandoTransportationThu, 09 Jan 2014 00:38:50 -0500Richard Reep4125 at http://www.newgeography.comThe Private Business of Public Arthttp://www.newgeography.com/content/004085-the-private-business-public-art
<p>Like many cities coming out of the downturn, Orlando is jonesing for a recovery. To promote a sense of new prosperity, City Hall leaders recently added eight works of art to its downtown core, amidst much fanfare. Before we start whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again,” however, we would do well to examine the circumstances of this renewed interest in public art. Its surprising return was trumpeted as a new way to enrich the city and benefit its residents; many, including this author, <a href="http://orlandoweekly.com/orlando-experiences-a-public-art-renaissance-1.1587774">applauded the effort</a>. This has certainly happened. But has the result been a barrier, as much as a connection, to its citizenry?<br />
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Public art, always controversial, became a battleground in the sixties and seventies, with cries of “waste of taxpayer money” heard in cities across the land. Artists, always exploring new frontiers, were victims of decency committees and moralizing mayors when their visions strayed much beyond a famous figure astride a horse. Public art placed politicians in yet one more hot seat they didn’t especially need. Yet these programs brought us great beauty, as well. Anish Kapoor’s <a href="http://anishkapoor.com/210/Cloud-Gate.html">Cloud Gate</a> in Chicago’s Millennium Park, and Maya Lin’s <a href="http://www.mayalin.com/">Vietnam War Memorial</a> in Washington, DC, for example, have proved to be enduring. In the right hands, art creates wondrous public space. Battlegrounds, yes; but many battles are worth fighting.</p>
<p>Private sponsorship, too, has had a place in the city: corporations, and sometimes even individuals, have commissioned works for their prominent institutions. While the state usually plays it safe with taxpayer money, the private commission was a place where an artist could dare. Good cities have a combination of both. Here in Orlando, the combination was alive and well, until spending on art ceased sometime early in the downturn. </p>
<p>Public investment in art is suddenly in vogue, and while City Hall takes the kudos for the $1.5 million that has been spent in Orlando, a careful reading of the script shows that no taxpayer money was actually used. Private donors commissioned the art; City Hall merely placed it, mostly on public property. The public/ private partnership seems to have resulted in a collaboration, and a sense of unity between the corporate world, high net worth individuals, and the state, with the public getting the spillover effect of some new art to view. </p>
<p>All seems to be great, suddenly, in our newfound prosperous era. The state and its richest citizens so often are adversaries who struggle over tax policy, and find little common ground over something as uneconomical as art. But out of nowhere, a collegial atmosphere has sprung forth, with participants rallying around ethereal values such as aesthetics and an inspiring sidewalk. Private interests and public officials are now holding hands round their new treasures, exhorting the public to share in this festival of new art. We seem to be awash in original works of great creative import, thanks to our visionary politicians and our benevolent corporate chieftains.</p>
<p>And now, a closer look. Of the eight pieces chosen by a jury that reviewed many entries, nearly all are modifications of public art pieces installed elsewhere. Kentucky-based artist Meg White’s “Muse of Discovery” is very similar to her “Awaking Muse” in Schaumburg, Illinois, for example, and others follow suit. There is nothing wrong with this, and the works are all quite good. Yet taken together, the multiple pieces speak of safety and security. Sure-fire crowd pleasers similar to those that already adorn malls and parks in other cities were chosen here. Orlando, where the current t-shirt slogan sadly seems to be <a href="http://www.theorlandoan.com/p/marketplace.html">Orlando Doesn’t Suck</a>, did not merit much originality , judging by the artworks chosen by a volunteer jury.</p>
<p>Public art programs were born in an era when public works brought us bland, uninspiring buildings and infrastructure, and the intent was to force cities to inject some originality and creativity into government projects. Today, the municipal art budget has been turned over to private donors, and City Hall has successfully escaped its obligation to pay its percent – a parsimonious proportion to begin with – and zeroed out its budget for creativity and originality. Other people’s art and other people’s money are cleverly passed off as an enhancement to the city’s public realm, with politicians taking credit for this coup.</p>
<p>Orlando's current public art situation is emblematic of our new era of the blurred lines between public and private interests. Pre-recession, a few individuals and a few corporations placed art of their own choosing in the public realm as an expression of taste. Today, they are reticent to do so, except through a complicated <a href="http://seeartorlando.com/#home">nonprofit agency</a>. Are our high net worth individuals and our corporate citizens so afraid of their capitalist peers that they can no longer put public art on their own property at their own discretion, without being accused of soft-hearted sentimentality and a lack of interest in profit?</p>
<p>And are politicians so battle-scarred that they no longer wish to suggest that the taxpayer deserves to have his or her money spent on art? The original motive to elevate the public realm and visibly set a level of taste and sophistication is no longer sufficient for state-sponsored art. Neither does this new private sponsorship seem to rely much on site-specific commissions, preferring to adapt art that has been focus-group tested elsewhere, like any good consumer product.</p>
<p>Studies that correlate a rich public realm with cities that are chosen for corporate relocations seem to justify the move into art by Orlando, a city desperate for more jobs. So, in the end, it is about money after all. In Florida, home to Art Basel Miami, we may be experiencing an arms race of sorts, as cities compete for the hip and the cool on an absurd stage to win over the creative class. This should be no surprise to anyone who is involved in the arts, a group that has become increasingly cynical about diminished funding from public and private donors alike. Artists, of course, lose out; as craftsmen who labor for the sake of attracting more jobs to the region, they have less and less impact on the city’s public face.</p>
<p>The result is a public/private partnership that is carefully orchestrated to eliminate controversy, squelch accusations of taxpayer waste, and to provide a safe and secure support group for those rare capitalists who are still soft-hearted enough to care about arts funding. These motives insulate the city from its people, damping down all but a sure-fire applause reaction. In this twilight of public art, the face of the city is painted in a perfunctory way to please everyone yet no one, leaving a hollow and unsatisfying result. Of the new pieces selected by a committee, only Jacob Harmeling of Orlando created an original work, “The Cedar of Lebanon". Artists who come anywhere from Zurich to Oregon have installed other magnificent pieces, and even if they reference other art, these beautiful works can be considered in a new context. Central Florida, home to the great pool of creative talent, including many who service world-class theme parks, will appreciate the gesture regardless of the mechanics behind it.</p>
<p>This new era, like other times, will ultimately be judged by the quality of the stuff that it leaves behind. Timeless art that says something specific and intense will ultimately contribute to Orlando’s place in the future of the city as a global entity. Let’s hope the new artwork is respected and honored, that it takes on its own sense of place, and that it revives a conversation about what our cities mean to us.</p>
<p><i>Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.</p>
<p>Photo by Richard Reep: "Cedar of Lebanon" by Jacob Harmeling</i></p>
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004085-the-private-business-public-art#commentsHealthOrlandoPlanningFloridaWed, 11 Dec 2013 09:43:36 -0500Richard Reep4085 at http://www.newgeography.com